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Plate I.

Chapter I
EARLY RECORDS OF BENCOOLEN AND
OBSERVATIONS ABOUT CONVICTS

In opening this account of the old convict jail at Singapore, it will be necessary to refer, as we have said, in some little detail to the history of the settlements of Bencoolen, Penang, and Malacca, to which convicts from India were first sent, prior to their reception into the Singapore prison.

The first penal settlement was Bencoolen, the Banka-Ulu[1] of the Malays, to which they were transported from India about the year 1787, much about the same time that transportation to Australia for English convicts was sanctioned by our laws.

Bencoolen was singularly adapted as a receptacle for convict labour; it was not a populous place when we took it in 1685, nor, as far as we can gather, had the population much increased up to the year 1787, and the few Sumatrans and Malays that were its inhabitants were an indolent race, and preferred a life of ease to any kind of labour. They were content to get their livelihood from fishing, and they had no artificial wants. They would occasionally work upon pepper plantations, and would bring the berries to Bencoolen for sale to British merchants. Labour was therefore wanted here, and the East India Company thought that by its introduction they would make of Bencoolen a thriving settlement; but as it turned out they were greatly disappointed, for both pepper and camphor, which were the only commodities there for trade, greatly declined; and commerce, which was all-important to the East India Company, almost entirely disappeared after its establishment for some few years. It was a miserable place from all accounts, and was described by Captain James Lowe, in 1836, "as an expensive port, and of no use to any nation that might possess it," and he only echoed what was previously said of it by William Dampier, who had once been there in the humble position of a gunner, that it was "a sorry place, sorrily governed, and very unhealthy." So unhealthy was it, that it became necessary as early as 1714 to remove the Residency and offices to a point of land about two miles further off the coast, which was called Fort Marlborough; but even this locality was found not to be beyond the reach of malaria, and the place continued, as Crawfurd says, to be more or less unhealthy down to the cession of the settlement in 1825. But it had, however, done its work in providing for us a firm footing in those seas, and was a help to the next step in our progress towards a wider empire.

It is important to relate here that its last Lieut.-Governor was the founder of our now important settlement of Singapore. He took up the appointment at Bencoolen on the 20th March, 1818, founded Singapore in 1819, returned to Bencoolen in 1820, and finally left for England in 1824.